How Wall Street Became a Giant Hedge Fund

 “Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.” – Warren Buffett (2003).

Some people are placing the blame for our current financial crisis squarely on the shoulders of greedy Wall Street financiers. They have a valid point. At least part of the problem can be attributed to greed. How and why greed undid some of the great financial institutions is best told by a Wall Street insider.

“Andy Kessler is a former hedge fund manager turned author who writes on technology and markets.”

His article, The Demise of a Giant Hedge Fund - The old Wall Street is dead. Long live the new Wall Street, appeared in the October 13, 2008 The Weekly Standard.

Wall Street is really just a compensation scheme. Firms generate sales, and employees get half the money. Yes, half. The rest, after expenses goes to shareholders. Sweet deal.

By 2002, Wall Street firms, despite being flush with huge balance sheets of capital to generate returns with, were no longer making money in their bread and butter business of stock and bond trading, investment banking, and money management. The one group making money were these weird guys with math Ph.D.s creating exotic securities, derivatives, pieces of paper backed by pools of assets, maybe airplane leases, or home mortgages. The neat thing about derivatives is that no one but the person who created them knows what they’re worth, so you can sell them at huge markups. Woo-hoo. Mammoth departments were created all over Wall Street to securitize everything that moved. With the Fed forcing low interest rates in 2002-2004, the higher the yield the better.

Subprime home mortgages, because of higher risk (ooh, don’t say that word), had high yields and moved to the top of the list. When not enough of these loans could be bought from banks, firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman set up entire loan-origination subsidiaries, and in true Wall Street style were aggressive and rose to the top of the market-share tables. If you want to know why Wall Street CEOs made so much, it wasn’t from trading your 1,000 shares of Apple stock.

Still, those profits weren’t enough. Their customers were making great money buying Wall Street’s derivatives. But why should banks and pension funds and hedge funds have all the fun? What a perfect use for all that capital on their huge balance sheets and cheap financing from low interest rates. Wall Street, en masse, started buying all these high yielding derivatives for their own account. They ate their own dog food, if you will.

…all of a sudden, Wall Street is no longer a business of traders or stock brokers or investment bankers, it’s a giant hedge fund. And they have no idea what they are doing. None. I ran a hedge fund for a lot of years and learned rather quickly that if a trade was too good, if everyone was doing the same trade, then I should absolutely turn around and run for the hills. But no one on Wall Street did. The spreadsheets flashed green. Risk was a four-letter word best not said in polite company.

Wall Streeters became hedge fund cowboys and loved the spoils, until a tiny little downturn in housing sent everyone rushing to get out of the pool at the same time. Deleveraging a balance sheet leveraged at 30 to 1 is not easy or pretty when everyone is doing it along with you. And this is not the customer panic-selling and paying fees to Wall Street, it’s Wall Street doing the selling, pushing prices into the irrational range and turning companies belly up overnight.

Is this the end of Wall Street? More like the start of a new one. At the end of the day, Wall Street is not about the names on the door, it’s about the people inside. There were great people at Lehman and Enron, Bear Stearns and AIG. Those who have a nose for making money will join other firms, or hedge funds, or start their own shop. Still, I’m pretty sure that half of those employed on Wall Street in 2007 will be doing something else by January.

And the new Wall Street? There’s only one direction. It’s back to basics. Not quite back to the old white shoes-blue blood partnerships of the past but certainly that business model. With a lot less capital, sit on the edge of the stock market and provide access to capital for the next set of great companies. Take ‘em public, bank ‘em, and grow with ‘em. It may not be as exciting as the last few years, but it beats getting dumped in the East River.

My Conclusion

In the end, greed was a big factor, but so was a complete failure to manage risk, properly. Top management at some investment banks, supposedly intelligent people, essentially bet their whole company on a strategy that amounted to putting too many eggs in one basket. They ending up owning “exotic securities, derivatives, pieces of paper backed by pools of assets.” They did not understand these securities any better than the people they sold them to.

And because there was no transparency or regulation, the investment bankers could take on as much risk as they wanted to. So they used way too much leverage. They simply took more risk than they had the ability to take. These bets were very profitable, until things went the wrong way. And, because they used such a large amount of borrowed money, there was just no margin for error.

And when many on Wall Street tried to “deleverage” at the same time, i.e. they all tried to sell at once, there was no one on the other side of the trade. There were not enough buyers, so there was no liquidity, just when it was most needed.

See the quote at the top of this post.

To be continued …

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